In the fifth installment of our exclusive look back at Justice League Animated, the focus is turned to the casting of the roles of Green Lantern/John Stewart and Superman, featuring the reflections of the respective actors who voiced them, Phil LaMarr and George Newbern, as well as vocal/casting director Andrea Romano.

ANDREA ROMANO:
Phil LaMarr was an actor I’d worked with on a series called Static Shock. He had done an audition at his agent’s office and I thought he was very, very good. I called up some people who had worked with him and tried to get some background. If I’m going to commit to a series with somebody, I want to know that it’s going to be a pleasant experience. I like to think of putting together a cast as being similar to putting together a party. Who’s going to have fun together? Who’s going to play well together? Who’s going to bring something to the party? As I was doing my research on Phil, I got very positive response, he gets the joke, he understands what’s going on. Like I said, I had gotten to know him on Static Shock. We were auditioning for Justice League and we brought him in when we decided that we wanted Green Lantern to be played by an actor of color. Phil did a voice for me that he’d never done. When you do a series like Static Shock, and I think we did 52 episodes of that series, and you cast him as a lot of other incidental roles within, you think you’ve heard them all. But he did five different versions of the voice for us and we were all blown away. All of them were good. On Static Shock he played a 16 or 17-year-old boy. With Green Lantern, we play him with this depth to his voice and this kind of military feel, which we wanted for the role. We wanted to play him almost like a Marine, and he just blew us away. So that was kind of easy casting.

PHIL LAMARR
The most significant evolution for the character has been having a personal life and a romantic life. Initially, I think because it was a new series and there were so many characters, you didn’t really get much information about anybody. So it’s been really cool to have more and more information come out. And emotional depth information. We know more about these characters personally than you do about the Law & Order guys after so many years.. On the other hand you’ve got NYPD Blue where it’s like, “He had cancer, his son died, then his wife died” – too much personal information. We’re not there. I think the writers have done an amazing job of tying in character information and developments into plot, so it’s not one at the expense of the other. The big break up episode [“Starcrossed”] has earth being invaded and enslaved. That’s the episode where I meet my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend.

It’s really interesting for comic book characters, because these characters have been around for decades upon decades and are generally not allowed to develop in the comics. Or if they do, someone has to come along and erase it every 10 years. Bruce Timm and the writers have made a conscious decision that we’re taking these characters and putting them in our world and the rules here are different. Everybody doesn’t come back to one at the end of every episode. We don’t take all the comic book continuity, we take what we like. The producers have certainly earned the freedom.

SUPERMAN (GEORGE NEWBERN)

ANDREA ROMANO:
We had done massive auditions when we were casting Superman The Animated Series, and we did want the marquee name initially for the role. Tim Daly fit the bill, he did a beautiful acting job on it. But at the end of the series he moved to Rhode Island and started producing and directing more, and his availability became very limited, so we did another casting. This was right around the time of the Justice League series. We weren’t even looking for a soundalike, we were just looking for someone to play the role of Superman. Since it was a new incarnation in a new series, we thought it was fine to go ahead and recast. We cast a pretty wide net around the town and found an actor named George Newbern, who is probably best known as the young son in the remake of the Father of the Bride movies; he plays Steve Martin’s son-in-law. A lovely actor who, coincidentally, sounds very similar to Tim Daly. It was a very nice fit and it worked out well. Superman is one of the characters we joke about, because it seems that if we don’t electrocute Superman in every episode, we’re just not happy. So not only did he have to be able to act through the role and have a voice, he had to be able to do intense screams of pain as if he were being electrocuted.

GEORGE NEWBERN:
The grunts and moans are really hard for me and it hurts. They gave me more of that stuff than I ever thought I would have to do. I’m a trained singer, I was in musical theater for a long time, so I know how to support my voice, to keep from completely ruining it. But when you scream in these short bursts, you have to actually abuse your vocal chords to get the sound. The problem is that they have me have these extended screams and I have to kind of look up and say, “I can only do two more. You’ve got to wait until the end,” then I go home and I can’t talk for a day. None of the other characters have to do it. I have to say that’s really the hardest part about that job. There is always some laser beam or electric device that requires an extended cry from me.

One of the coolest things about the show so far is I did a voice for a little costume you get at Toys R Us. You push the S on the breastplate and it says things like, “I’m Superman,” “Up, up and away” – 10 or 12 different things. I bought it for my boy, but my girls, when they’re sitting in the swing, put it on and push each other. So you see the cape flying while they’re continuing to push the S. It’s been worth absolutely every moment just to know that in the future they’ll know that dad was Superman at some point. That’s just awesome. So many jobs you just go do and you don’t even think about them. But with this one, there’s definitely that cool factor of, “I got to be Superman at one point in my life.”

LOOK FOR PART FIVE OF THIS SERIES ON FRIDAY JANUARY 25, 2013

About egross

I remember watching Justice League and having no idea that Tim Daly wasn’t voicing Superman. Newbern did a great job in keeping the consistent feeling of the voice and of course Andrea Romano has always done a wonderful job of finding the right voices for the right roles.